Don't be so quick to say no. Statistics show that more and more schoolkids are guilty. Straight talk on how to stop the wrongdoing.

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Marianne Sullivan was disappointed but not all that surprised. When the literature teacher at Penn Manor High School, in Millersville, Pennsylvania, gave a vocabulary test last year, she noticed a student pulling crib notes from under his sleeve when he thought she wasn't looking. "I went over and just took his paper away," says Sullivan. "I didn't say anything, and neither did he. He knew he was done."

Later Sullivan met with the student and asked him the same question she poses to all "busted" cheaters: Why did you do it? "He told me he forgot about the test until too late and didn't have a chance to study," she says. The student received a zero on the test, and his parents were notified. Sadly, says Sullivan, this is far from an isolated case. At her school, she has seen a steady increase of students taking ethical shortcuts.

National statistics tell a similar story. According to Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, in Los Angeles, 74 percent of 10,000 high school students surveyed in 2002 had cheated on a test in the previous 12 months. In another survey published a year earlier by Donald McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, 74 percent of high school students and 75 percent of college students admitted to using dishonest means to achieve better grades.

Cheating is nothing new, of course, but schools are seeing some unprecedented high-tech variations. There are students who store key test information on electronic pagers and then program the devices to signal them on vibration mode with the answers. Others download crib notes to their hand-held computers and, if they feel like sharing the wealth, instant-message the answers to their friends' hand-held machines. Still others record test material on cassette tapes right over their favorite music and receive homemade Cliff's Notes through their headphones as they take the test.

Where are the teachers? you may ask. Why do they let these electronic aids in the room? "Many teachers around the country aren't up to speed on the latest forms of cheating," says Kathleen Foss, coauthor, along with Ann Lathrop, of Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call, and a school librarian for 31 years in Los Alamitos, California. Many teachers haven't caught on to the headphone and pager scams, and it's not so easy to ban the smaller electronic aids from the classroom anyway. "What are they going to do — start frisking students?" asks Foss. Then there's the fact that teachers often use exam time to catch up on other work and don't want to play detective.

While the cheating epidemic is troubling, students' attitudes are even more disturbing to teachers and administrators. "A lot of students don't think they're doing something wrong enough to worry about," says McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. "They think we should focus on the big picture — the politicians and businessmen — not cheating in schools. 'People cheat,' the students say. 'Get over it.'"

Experts blame schools and parents, many of whom haven't been tough enough in catching and punishing cheaters. "There's a lot of lip service that honesty is important, but the adults often don't follow through," says Josephson. "When parents find out their kid has cheated, they should want the cheating rules enforced, not threaten the school or even call a lawyer, as many do."

And are parents themselves partly to blame for the uptick in cheating by pushing their children too hard? "Kids who feel relentless pressure from parents to excel, to get an A and only an A, might very well resort to cheating," says Diane Waryold, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity.

Many experts point to a more pragmatic reason: the time crunch. "Kids will sign up for advanced-placement courses and join clubs, hold down a part-time job, play football or field hockey — when are they going to get their homework done or find time to study for a test?" asks Foss. "Cheating suddenly becomes an option."

As it does for the otherwise law-abiding kids who see fellow students fattening up their GPAs through dishonest means. Experts call this the cheating effect. It's not unlike the crisis in professional sports — some athletes fear that if they don't take steroids or other illegal performance drugs, they will suffer in comparison with those who do. "Honest kids feel they have to keep up with the Joneses when it comes to grades," says McCabe. "So if a bunch of kids decide to cheat, other kids may follow in their footsteps."

How do we call a halt? Get tougher, urge the experts. "Parents should band together and talk to school administrators to make them address the issue," says Josephson. "If a school's funding were dependent on solving the cheating problem, they would get creative very quickly."

While increased surveillance at schools could help bring many of the offenders to justice, prevention is ultimately more effective. And experts agree on where the campaign should start — at home. Here are several steps every parent should take:

Talk the talk. Some 34 percent of parents don't talk to their kids about cheating because they believe their child would never engage in it. The statistics don't support this optimism. "Parents have to make it clear that cheating is wrong and that they would be deeply disappointed if their child did it," says Josephson.

Teach by example. Living honestly rubs off. "Cheating on taxes or lying about your child's age at the movie theater to save money on the ticket — these are behaviors that your child may pick up on and use to justify cheating in school," says Foss.

Support the school. "Parents frequently want to enforce the rules when another kid gets caught, but not when it's their own child," says Marvin Berkowitz, Ph.D., a professor of character education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. But teachers are more willing to take on cheating if they know the parents are fully behind the crackdown.

Listen to a cheating child. If your teen is caught cheating, ask why he did it — and really listen. Sometimes a child resorts to dishonesty because of an undiagnosed learning disability. Or he might be having serious social or emotional problems at school, distracting him from his studies.

Impose consequences. For the kid guilty of cheating without mitigating circumstances, you must come up with a sanction that leaves him saying "It isn't worth it." Figure out what he really values, whether it's driving privileges or a ski trip. And stick to your guns. When you're serious about something, your kid knows it.